Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52NOVEMBER 2016 13 Ontario Seed Cleaners and Dealers. John Eros hired me, but not as an accountant,” he recalls. “I knew nothing about seed, but I was soon immersed in it.” John Eros was an important player in the seed business back then. He was a leader in seed cleaning technology with his magnetic seed separators, and he was a master of marketing. According to Malon: “John Eros had the contacts to develop a very large market for a forage seed mixture recom- mended by the Quebec Government. ‘B-Mixture’ was a mixture of timothy, alsike and red clover and it became the company’s biggest business, trading in 40,000-pound rail car lots throughout Ontario and Quebec.” A Time of Trust Malon says back then the business was built on handshakes and trust. “Seed was bought and sold over the phone, without samples. I regularly sold seed to Norway, sight unseen,” he says. “The buyers trusted that they would receive exactly what they were promised, and I always made sure that they did.” Lloyd Dyck, chairman of BrettYoung Seeds echoes that statement: “People in the business always held to their words, no matter the changes in mar- kets or prices.” He says back then people in the trade supported each other. “Friends were friends and com- petitors were competitors, but people always reached out to help if someone was in trouble,” he says. “I remember my dad writing a cheque for almost a million dollars to a grower who was facing foreclosure.” However, it was competitive. Seed buyers would go out to rural areas with cash, sometimes as much as $20,000 and a book. “The buyer would visit a farm, look at the seed, estimate the amount available, get the farmer to sign off in the book, and hand them a sub- stantial down payment in cash with the balance payable on delivery,” Dyck says. He tells one story of competition in the Peace River area: “All of the buyers would be in the Peace at harvest time to buy seed. There weren’t many places to stay in those days, so they would all end up in the same hotel. At the end of day the guys would write their wakeup call requests in a book on the hotel desk. Sometimes the last person up would change the wake-up times for everyone else so he could be up first and on the road.” Until the late 1950s, Ontario led the forage seed sector, but the vast expanse of land and good growing conditions in Western Canada became more attrac- but because the industry was small and everyone knew everyone else.” Arriving from Scotland in 1961 to work for the Brackman-Ker Milling Company, Richardson was stationed at Rycroft, Alberta. “I was 21 years old and was bonded and given a chequebook that allowed me to buy up to $10,000 a day of raw uncleaned seed,” he says. “I drove 18,000 miles in three months mainly on gravel roads. We worked from sun up to sun down.” The competition was tough, with buyers from grain companies like Alberta Wheat Pool and United Grain Growers competing with independ- ent companies like McCabes from Winnipeg, Fosters from Beaverlodge and Steel-Robertson at Grand Prairie. According to Richardson, buyers had to be experienced in seed cleaning and weed identification. “The buyer would visit a farm, quote a price and a dock- age percentage,” he says. “The price was set by head office, and usually a farmer would ask two or three buyers to quote, so the buyer’s skill in estimating dock- age was critical.” Varieties: A Step Change In the 1950s and into the 1960s, virtually all of the seed traded was “common” seed, often harvested from native stands and saved by farmers. But forward thinking seedsmen, such as Tib tive. According to Angus Richardson, former owner of Richardson Seed Company, the Peace River area of Alberta and British Columbia opened the west for Canadian forage seed. The major forage crops were alsike and sweet clover, smooth bromegrass, Alta Swede red clover, alfalfa, creeping red fescue and timothy. Richardson agrees that, just as it was in the early days in Ontario, business in the west was based on trust. “This was the age before computers and direct dial telephones,” he says. “A deal was done with the shaking of hands and/ or just a man’s word. The paperwork would follow often after the seed was shipped. This worked, I sus- pect, not because seedsmen were more honest than the average person “In those days, forage seed was the backbone of Ontario agriculture. Corn was only on the fringes.” — Martin Pick In the 1950s, BrettYoung Seeds was a buyer of junegrass, Kentucky bluegrass and other types. Photo: BrettYoung.